“Everyone Who Made This Happen” takes a look at the outsize teams of artists and creative types it often takes to produce a single work.
Number of people involved: Over 30.
Time from conception to completion: About a year.
When Matthieu Blazy was named the creative director of Bottega Veneta in 2021, he urged his staff to find innovative ways of working with leather. This meant looking past the intrecciato, the 58-year-old brand’s trademark technique of braiding flat strips of leather, often into a slanted grid pattern. One of their responses was the Kalimero bucket bag, which is made, without a single stitch, by weaving a single piece of leather around a wood block and was featured in the opening look of Blazy’s first runway presentation three months later. Last summer, after seeing a picture of Sicilian basketry in a book about the island’s craft traditions, the French Belgian designer, 40, issued an updated challenge: to fuse the house’s methods with those of ancestral basket weaving. If his team could make leather resemble denim — or silk or flannel — Blazy, who delights in trompe l’oeil, thought, why not cane, willow or other plant materials?
First, a team that included the women’s leather goods design director Caterina Brocchi, as well as Filomena Ruffino and Alessandra Zamberlan, who are among the roughly 100 artisans based in Bottega Veneta’s atelier in the northern Italian town of Montebello Vicentino, traveled to fairs and exhibitions in Sicily and Poland to research basket-making practices. Upon their return, they set to work, per Blazy’s instruction, on a bag shaped like a clamshell. (Bottega Veneta was founded near Venice and, Blazy says, “there’s a relationship to water.”)
Silvia Galieni, who’s part of the atelier’s innovation team, worked with tanners to source the right leathers, like one that was embossed and printed to look like banana leaves, which are used for baskets in places ranging from Haiti to the Philippines. Those fabrics were then made into not flat but tubular strips meant to give the bag structure while remaining supple. Zamberlan plied the thinnest, firmest tubes, which had been stuffed with foam rubber, to sculpt a base and an armature for the bag, much like she would have had she been making a classic European style of basket known as a stake and strand, before interweaving thicker, wadding-filled tubes between its vertical bones. Another artisan, Alessandro Golin, reinforced everything with hidden stitches of cotton thread, and Malick Aw, a graduate of Bottega Veneta’s Accademia Labor et Ingenium program, from which the brand hires 50 craftspeople a year, wielded a small brush to seal the ends of each tube with lacquer. Golin was also responsible for creating the leather strings that tie the bag shut. At one point, the group considered adding a metal hook or zip closure but, according to Barbara Zanin, the director of craft and heritage, the bag was better without either.
Blazy and Zanin are in constant dialogue. “The way I structured the company is that I erased the idea of the artiste,” Blazy says. “It’s an adventure we do together.” He hopes the Clam bag, as it’s known, which debuted at Bottega Veneta’s spring 2024 show, will inspire a similar sense of adventure in others, though there, too, Blazy is happy to cede control. When asked if this luxurious reinterpretation of a woven beach tote might be too nice for the actual beach, Blazy gently disagrees. “The function of the bag,” he says, “is decided by the one who carries it.”
Photo assistant: Alice Beltrami
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